We caution our young researchers here at the magazine not to rely solely on the Internet to verify facts. If you’re reading this you’re probably a regular Internet user and you know what I mean. The web is a font of misinformation, half-truths and totally made-up stuff.
So I was a little dubious about the item going around Facebook that purported to be a Washington Post article about a brilliant classical violinist who posed as a down-and-out street musician at a D.C. Metro station and played some of the greatest music the world has ever known on his $3.5 million Stradivarius only to be largely ignored by the thousand harried and preoccupied commuters with more prosaic things on their minds than stopping to listen to the most beautiful live renderings of Bach and Schubert they are likely to ever hear. According to the tale, only a 3-year-old boy paid any real attention and he was quickly pulled along by his mom. Call me cynical, but that’s the detail that struck me as suspiciously hokey and likely fabricated.
So I did a little checking (yes, I used the Internet) and found that the story was true, if a bit dated. In fact it won a Pulitzer Prize for Post journalist Gene Weingarten in 2007. He’d put the renowned Joshua Bell up to the stunt to see the interplay between beauty and context, aesthetics and environment. Among other things he wanted to know if something profoundly wondrous can detach us from our diurnal self-preoccupations. Apparently not. Unless we are open to the beauty of the world around us, as that little boy was (sorry, kid).
But a little more digging revealed an intriguing, even mysterious twist. Unbeknownst to Weingarten and Bell this exact same charade had been carried out before, in 1930, by a newspaperman in Chicago named Milton Fairman and famed fiddler Jacques Gordon, who played for spare change on his own priceless Strad. The results were startlingly similar: Among other pieces, they both performed Massenet’s “Meditation” from Thais, an opera about the Christian conversion of a notorious Greek courtesan, and Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” Each violinist was recognized by only one passerby. Gordon made $5.61 for his panhandling pains; Bell collected $32.17. Adjusted for inflation, the amounts are pretty close. Gordon may have even made out a little better, given the times.
Here’s what sent a little shiver down my spine. Jacques Gordon died long before Bell was born. But Bell knew of Gordon both by reputation and in a most unusual and intimate way. In 1991, a young Joshua Bell had bought a famed Stradivarius and played it as his own fame rocketed. That violin had once belonged to Gordon—the very violin he played on that Chicago street corner in May of 1930.
So maybe this was more that two journalists stumbling on the same stunt and two virtuosos playing along, as it were. Maybe it was more causative than correlative. Maybe it was the Composer of the universe chiding us to pay a little less attention to ourselves and a bit more to the beauty that surrounds us even in the most ordinary circumstances of life, beauty that is meant to touch our souls.
